[Ed note: If there is only one thing to remember about data journalism, it's this: It requires data! In this post, published May 16th and reprinted by permission, David Holmes, the west coast editor of PandoDaily, points to stories that claim to be based on data, but aren't. Please have a look. –Paul Raeburn.]
Hi all, David here.
The cult of the "explainer site" has taken online media by storm, with Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and the New York Times' the Upshot all launching within a few months.
But explaining the news is harder than it looks, and it's made even more problematic when your site's mission statement (which for these sites is more-or -less "We've got data on our side so you should listen to us") implies an authoritativeness that other sites apparently lack.
Two pieces today, one from Vox and one from the Upshot, jumped out at me (and many others) as making arguments that the capital-D Data just doesn't support.
The first was Vox's "Stop forcing people to wear bike helmets." The piece brings up a lot of data points about how biking isn't that much more dangerous than walking or driving a car, and even admits that "If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower." But when it comes to what the post claims is the most important data point ("Do helmets affect the total rate of head injuries and the overall accident rate?") it says this data is "ambiguous." Meanwhile, the claim that helmets could make accidents MORE likely is largely anecdotal.
The fact that is a public safety issue makes the post that much more insidious. But I guess the headline, "Some evidence may suggest helmet laws aren't as effective as we think" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
The other post at the Upshot wasn't quite as bad but still raised some eyebrows. The original headline was "There Are Still No Openly Gay Major C.E.O.s" (it now reads "Where Are the Gay Chief Executives"). The piece raises some good points about how being openly gay in corporate America may be less widely-accepted than it is in the "testosterone-fueled" worlds of the NFL and the NBA.
As the Atlantic Wire's Eric Levenson writes, that's true. But also: as many people were quick to point out, her story does not even mention someone who is arguably the most powerful man, gay or straight, in American business: Apple CEO Tim Cook."
It's true that Cook has not made a big show of announcing his sexual preference, but it's been well-discussed by Apple's observers and followers, and Cook has spoken publicly about facing discrimination. So the fact that the Times writer does not even mention Cook in a piece about gay CEOs is a little odd. And you would think that the Upshot, as concerned with empiricism as it claims to be, might want to define what it means by "openly gay" before saying there are no openly gay CEOs.
The takeaway here is that new sites can talk all they want in their mission statements about how authoritative and data-driven they are. But authority is something that's earned or lost one story at a time, not something you can claim so flippantly.
-David Holmes
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